This is another classic example of the politicians' disdain for the people they are supposed to represent.

There was absolutely no justification for the passing of this legislation, except for the cynical calculation that it would disenfranchise more potential Labor voters than Liberal.

I would like to think that this is solely the act of a superannuated political hack, clinging as long as possible to the hope of continued sustenance from our gravy train.

But I strongly suspect that it is just another one of those things that any political party would do, in the same position.

Not a scrap of integrity amongst the lot of them.

I can’t understand how people can be particularly concerned about an early close to the electoral role. Hasn’t everyone in the country had adequate notice of the forthcoming election and adequate time to get themselves on the roll?

It’s a minor issue.

Meanwhile the extraordinarily corrupt compulsory preferential voting system draws practically no adverse comment. Optional preferential is good. Compulsory preferential is profoundly antidemocratic, the details of which I have elucidated numerous times on this forum (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=208#4001).

“First-time voters deserve more help than any other group to enrol and there should be as few barriers to their voting as possible.”

Granted. But more importantly, we MUST have a voting system that allows voters to declare their preferences as they wish and not obligate them to mark every square, which effectively steals your vote if you wish to specifically not vote for either of the main candidates, and gives a horribly distorted impression of support for the large parties.

Perhaps Ed Coper would like to research this and write and article accordingly.

As stated by Ludwig - I do not see the early close of the electoral role as undemocratic. I enrolled as soon as I was 18 because it was the right thing to do just like applying for my drivers licence. Enrolling to vote is not perceived as a rite of passage as perhaps it should or could be. Perhaps this is only an issue because of the apathy in our population - voting does not give people a chance to really make their point or have their say. They have to vote for people they don't want to vote for, and then when they do their preferences are allocated in a way that may not necessarily be their intention.
As our voting system requires the numbering of each box on the ballot sheet it requires us to vote for people or a parties which may hold violently opposing views to our own. Perhaps we should be voicing our concern to push for a fundamental change to our voting system to address this instead.
Kind of makes you wonder what is the point really - our vote is not really our vote at all.

I think this is an important issue.
This is because as noted it may bias the election outcome, akin perhaps to the machine voting in America or the roll tampering that apparently occurred.
If we had big public information campaigns saying politics is, at least more so now than before, a game in which winning justifies the means used. Clever politics I think it is called like dog whistling and wedging.
Perhaps all media should carry the warning politics is a game for politicians to win thus a possible hazard to the man in the street.Seek you own information.

What a wimp you current lot are! In the good old days the writ was issued at 6pm, irrespective of the time it was actually issued. If the government wanted a snap poll, (7 days for nominations, then a further 7 days until the vote), they would announce the imminent issue of the writ at 5pm, leaving recalcitrant electors 60 minutes to apply to get on the roll. These modern arrangements seem overly generous to me, considering that all persons reaching the age of 18 are legally obliged to enrol, and commit an offence if they fail to do so.

As far as the obligation for electors to allocate preferences to all other candidates is concerned, I consider that the ALP has scored another own goal in opposing this. I would expect in the seat of Bennelong there will be a large number of voters who will just put 1 for Maxine, and those votes will be declared informal. If Johnny's majority is less that the number of those votes, tough luck for Labor.

We saw in the last election how Family First were elected on ALP preferences, and wonder what the ALP will stuff up this time.

It appears Ed Coper has got it all upside-down with respect to so-called early roll closure. The 'showbag lucky dip' resulting in an extra day's grace for those electors currently enrolled, but at an incorrect address, to update their enrolment particulars would have been no surprise at all to anyone viewing OLO discussions in recent months.

Whilst the fact that this day's grace would be due to the Flinders Island Show Day public holiday specifically could not have been known (because no OLO poster knew when the elections would be called), this general prospect of an extension of time before roll closure was quite foreseeable from the changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act introduced by the amending legislation [Or well, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2006].

The relevant OLO discussion occurred in one of regular OLO contributor James Sinnamon (User ID daggett)'s topics, "Vote against four year Federal Parliamentary terms", in the following posts:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=881#15277
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=881#15317
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=881#15340
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=881#15370
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=881#15398
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=881#15428

The real surprise was John Howard's apparent advice to the Governor-General to initially only proclaim the prorogation of the Parliament on Sunday 14 October 2007, a Proclamation published in Special Gazette S 204 dated Monday 15 October, but not the concurrent dissolution of the House of Representatives in the same Proclamation, which has had the effect of giving an additional three day's grace to first time enrollees and those re-enrolling, and a total of nine day's grace to those updating addresses. It is interesting to see the Prime Minister seemingly finessing his way around his own government's 2006 amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act in this manner. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1151#20488

We will all be much better off, if those who were too slack to enroll previously, although eligible, do not now get to vote.

One of the main problems with this country is that we are spoon feeding too many people, who are just not worth feeding.

Hasbeen that's a false correlation. It's likely the people who don't vote could be more informed about domestic and world issues than those who do vote.

One shouldn't be too hard on Ed Coper, even if he is too blinded by a 'football club' style of loyalty to his own political biases to realize that it is the whole 'code of the game' that may have been subverted in Australia, when speaking with respect to electoral manipulation and the structuring of electoral law.

Ed is to be thanked for highlighting some glaring contradictions between different sets of official statistics that should in fact be in agreement, but are not.

Ed parrots the claim "Despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud....", a claim echoed around the traps by many who hold themselves out as being electorally knowledgeable across the political spectrum. As if evidence would be lying about on the surface in a matter so deadly serious as the wholesale subversion of the electoral process! You have to dig for it, and sadly Ed shows up as one of those too lazy, too complacent, or too one-eyed to do any such digging himself. He is, even more sadly, not alone in this among the many trying to influence the "choice" the genuinely lawful electors of Australia will shortly have to attempt to make.

The population statistics of Australia, published by the ABS, competently handled, should be capable of giving a very good indication of the number of persons eligible for electoral enrolment. The electoral enrolment statistics of Australia, published monthly in the Gazette, show the actual number of enrolments on the rolls.

Reconciliation of these two sets of statistics should show the extent of the eligible population that actually appears to have effected electoral enrolment. Problem is that for many years it seems that close to, or in excess of, 100% of the eligible appear to have been enrolled. Where does that leave room for the 410,000 eligible, but claimedly not currently enrolled, electors of which Ed (and Special Minister of State, Gary Nairn) speaks? Something is wrong and Ed should make an effort to find out what it is!

John Howard trying to "swing shut the doors of democracy" early? Read the Proclamations!